Brand Architect

Competitive CEOs are Going to be More Social

CEOs are starting to understand that using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile, a recent study by IBM has found. The study of 1709 CEOs around the world, found only 16% of them participating in social media. But research showed that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years, Forbes magazine reported. The infographic above is by Mark Fidelman

A Management Consultancy Embraces Creativity

AdAge recently published an article about advertising agencies and technology consultancies competing over software systems to handle and analysis data from large-scale digital marketing. But what interested me most was the fifth paragraph of the article:

“This week, consulting firm Deloitte introduced a unit, Deloitte Digital, that it said will handle strategy, creative, user experience, engineering and implementation services for marketers in digital channels. The firm, which acquired mobile-agency Ubermind this year, said it plans to expand Deloitte Digital aggressively over the next year.”

A major global management consultancy is providing creative services for its client and will build and implement the technology to deliver the creativity. That is a gamer changer and further challenges the creative agencies distinct value add to clients.

The Evolution of Social Media into Social Business

Social media is swiftly evolving into social business as more and more organizations grasp and start to harness the value of digital platform. Deloitte, in their Tech Trends 2012 report, provide a nice introduction to social business. Below are a couple of paragraphs from the report which can be found here.

“Even today, business leaders may dismiss the potential of social business, either relegating it to the realm of Internet marketing or ignoring the buzz as a passing fad. But that’s changing as boomers evolve into digital natives, millennials permeate the workforce and social media becomes a part of daily life…

“Leading enterprises today are applying social technologies like collaboration, communication and content management to social networks – the connected web of people and assets that impact on a given business goal or outcome – amplified by social media from blogs to social networking sites to content communities. Yet it’s more than tools and technology. Businesses are being fundamentally changed as leaders rethink their core processes and capabilities with a social mindset to find new ways to create more value, faster...

“Social business can shift an organization’s dynamic from isolation to engagement by providing vehicles for discovering, growing and propagating ideas and expertise. This shift requires organizations to take a more active approach to social. Beyond social monitoring and listening posts, leading organizations are establishing command centers to interact with consumers and the marketplace via the social sphere.

“Some interactions are transactional, such as customer relationship management, servicing or order management, while others seek to drive loyalty and brand activation. Functional areas such as Human Resources and recruiting are following sales and marketing’s lead, with customer service, product development and operations close behind….

“Behind it is a simple truth: people are the core of business. The balance of power has shifted from the corporation to the individual. Technology has made it easier to discover and participate in social networks, but it has not changed their currency: content, authenticity, integrity, reputation, commitment and follow-through. Social business allows organizations that share these values to fundamentally reshape how their companies run and serve their markets.”

Perspective is everything

 

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group, spoke at TEDxAthens about the importance of perspective and how the presentation of information influences people. He argues that reality is often less important than the perception of that reality.

The Good Natured One-upmanship of SA Brands

South African insurer Santam have produced a couple of very clever television commercials using British actor Ben Kingsley. Nandos, a Portuguese-style chicken food chain well known for using humor to market itself, decided to spoof the second ad in the Santam series. Santam responded producing a series of good natured and entertaining interactions. Below is the original Santam add, the Nandos spoof and the Santam response (using a Ben Kingsley impersonator, a key aspect of the first commercial).

 

 

 

Nandos accepted the challenge and promised it would do the food delivery to the Johannesburg Children's Home every month for the next 12 months.

Just Being Digital is Not a Strategy

The above cartoon from the always excellent Tom Fishburne accurately portrays that many brand managers and strategists confuse the digital media platform with a brand communication strategy or campaign.

“Sometimes marketers forget that media platforms are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the big ideas themselves,” Tom writes in the notes accompanying the cartoon. “Instead, a campaign strategy is built on big ideas that take advantage of the best media channels to bring those ideas to life.”

Continuing on this theme of how to properly use social media, management consultancy McKinsey have identified social media’s four primary functions, namely to monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behavior.

They have mapped those four functions next to a linear progression of steps in the consumer decision journey. Click on the image below for a larger view.

Toys ‘R’ Us Offers Insights as it Battles to Reinvent Itself

Interesting article in The New York Times about Toys ‘R’ Us battling to reinvent itself as it struggles with management defections, a decline in same-store sales and relentless competition from Walmart and Amazon.

Two key observations in the article: being physically big has become a problematic business model for many retailers, and traditional video games are being hurt by more nimble game manufacturers focusing on smart phones and tablets.

These observations are summed up in a couple of paragraphs taken from the article.

“Toys ‘R’ Us is part of a group of big, lumbering retailers trying to reinvent their businesses for a new era. Sears is trying to turn around sales declines through customized offers to customers, in-store technology and an online push. Best Buy is adding small stores to balance its big-box ones. J. C. Penney is creating stores-within-a-store to give shoppers more variety.”

“A major challenge has been a sharp reversal in video game sales. Once an area of growth, thanks to Nintendo Wii and other consoles, they have fallen as children move to iPhone games and apps for iPads. Last year, about 8 percent of Toys ‘R’ Us’s business was in video game sales, down from 11 percent in 2009.”

The Future of Branding is Nonfiction

Author and futurist Douglas Rushkoff, in an interview with Fast Company, argues that brands needs to strip away the carefully crafted stories and mythologies and simply tell the truth. The value of the brand, Rushkoff argues, is engaging consumers in an open and frank way. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

“[But] it’s not about creating a mythology around the way a product was created, so it’s no longer “these were cookies made by elves in a hollow tree.” That’s not the value of the brand. The value of the brand is where did this actually come from? What’s in this cookie? Who made it? Are Malaysian children losing their fingers in the cookie press or is this being made by happy cookie culture people?...

“Every company has a social media strategy whether they know it or not. You can have your dedicated social media person chasing down consumer complaints, but your real social media strategy is how are the people who work at your company and the people who buy from your company and people who supply to your company, how are they talking about you in social media? The way to make them talk about you [favorably] is by walking the walk of the thing that you do. And that’s so hard for so many of these companies because they’ve become so abstracted. They’ve become so distanced from the core competence of their industry.”

In reply to a question about what marketing companies will look like in the future, Rushkoff spoke of a shift from creative communication to more PR-type communication.

“It will be companies that figure out how to communicate the non-fiction story of a company, so it’s going to look a lot more like a communications company than a creative branding agency. It’s going to look a little bit more like PR, in some sense. It’s going to be people who go and figure out what does your company do and how do we let the world know about that?”

When Brands Shouldn’t Play Games

The always excellent Tom Fishburne’s above cartoon makes the very valid point that gamification is not for all brands and is also not a silver bullet solution for customer engagement and loyalty. Tom writes in the cartoon notes that:

“What some marketers miss is that gamification means a lot more than badges, points, mayorships, and leader boards. Those game mechanics don’t necessarily create experiences worth playing. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

“More importantly, gamification can’t make an un-engaging brand engaging. It may be the shiny new thing, but it’s not a silver bullet. Game mechanics are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the big ideas themselves.”

Agencies Paid Like They're Doing Clients' Laundry - Lee Clow

 

Valuing a creative idea and remunerating creative agencies has long been a issue of debate and contention in the industry. In the video above Lee Clow, Global Director of Media Arts at TBWA\Worldwide, shares his thoughts on agency compensation and the value that agencies provide.

Clow places blame on agencies' inability to properly value their contribution to the brand. "We're supposed to be a creative business, but I think we have been probably the least creative industry in the history of the world in terms of figuring out how to get paid."

In the three-minute video he bemoans agencies for allowing their work to be commoditized, and compares their renumeration to payment for doing the client’s laundry.

Reactivity, Flexibility and Speed

Increasingly these days brands are accepting and embracing the fact they need to react swiftly to ongoing changes in the market. The above quote comes from The Wall Street Journal and an article about how luxury brand Cartier is approaching the reality of change. "If something happens, and you start to sense a reverse trend coming, you must be able to reduce production overnight, otherwise you will build up your stock and reduce your cash-flow," Cartier President and CEO Bernard Fornas told the newspaper. "I am able to reduce production at almost no cost, quicker than anybody else in the market," he says. "Similarly I can increase production quicker than the others. That is very important; we are in a volatile environment."

Telling Great Stories

 

The ability to tell engaging stories is vital to brands in today’s era of content. Filmmaker Andrew Stanton of Toy Story and WALL-E is a master storyteller and shares what he knows about storytelling in this TED presentation. Please note Stanton uses some graphic language in his presentation.